Death and Mastery: Psychoanalytic Drive Theory and the Subject of Late Capitalism

By Benjamin Y. Fong

The first philosophers of the Frankfurt School famously turned to the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud to supplement their Marxist analyses of ideological subjectification. Since the collapse of their proposed marriage of Marx and Freud,” psychology and social theory have grown increasingly apart to the impoverishment of both. Returning to this unholy union, Benjamin Y. Fong reconstructs the psychoanalytic foundation stone” of critical theory in the effort to once again think together the possibility of psychic and social transformation.

Drawing on the work of Hans Loewald and Jacques Lacan, Fong complicates the famous antagonism between Eros and the death drive, which undergirds the Freudian concepts once appropriated by the critical theorists, in reference to a third term: the woefully undertheorized drive to mastery. Rejuvenating Freudian metapsychology through the lens of this pivotal concept, he then provides fresh perspective on Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse’s understandings of psychic life under the influence of modern cultural and technological change. The result is a novel vision of critical theory that rearticulates the nature of subjection in late capitalism and rejuvenates an old project of resistance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: Nov 8, 2016
• ISBN: 9780231542616

Book preview

DEATH AND MASTERY

NEW DIRECTIONS IN CRITICAL THEORY

New Directions in Critical Theory

Amy Allen, General Editor

New Directions in Critical Theory presents outstanding classic and contemporary texts in the tradition of critical social theory, broadly construed. The series aims to renew and advance the program of critical social theory, with a particular focus on theorizing contemporary struggles around gender, race, sexuality, class, and globalization and their complex interconnections.

Narrating Evil: A Postmetaphysical Theory of Reflective Judgment, María Pía Lara

The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory, Amy Allen

Democracy and the Political Unconscious, Noëlle McAfee

The Force of the Example: Explorations in the Paradigm of Judgment, Alessandro Ferrara

Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence, Adriana Cavarero

Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World, Nancy Fraser

Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory, Axel Honneth

States Without Nations: Citizenship for Mortals, Jacqueline Stevens

The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Négritude, Vitalism, and Modernity, Donna V. Jones

Democracy in What State?, Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Daniel Bensaïd, Wendy Brown, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière, Kristin Ross, Slavoj Žižek

Politics of Culture and the Spirit of Critique: Dialogues, edited by Gabriel Rockhill and Alfredo Gomez-Muller

Mute Speech: Literature, Critical Theory, and Politics, Jacques Rancière

The Right to Justification: Elements of Constructivist Theory of Justice, Rainer Forst

The Scandal of Reason: A Critical Theory of Political Judgment, Albena Azmanova

The Wrath of Capital: Neoliberalism and Climate Change Politics, Adrian Parr

Media of Reason: A Theory of Rationality, Matthias Vogel

Social Acceleration: The Transformation of Time in Modernity, Hartmut Rosa

The Disclosure of Politics: Struggles Over the Semantics of Secularization, María Pía Lara

Radical Cosmopolitics: The Ethics and Politics of Democratic Universalism, James Ingram

Freedom’s Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life, Axel Honneth

Imaginal Politics: Images Beyond Imagination and the Imaginary, Chiara Bottici

Alienation, Rahel Jaeggi

The Power of Tolerance: A Debate, Wendy Brown and Rainer Forst, edited by Luca Di Blasi and Christoph F. E. Holzhey

Radical History and the Politics of Art, Gabriel Rockhill

The Highway of Despair: Critical Theory After Hegel, Robyn Marasco

A Political Economy of the Senses: Neoliberalism, Reification, Critique, Anita Chari

The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory, Amy Allen

Recognition or Disagreement: A Critical Encounter on the Politics of Freedom, Equality, and Identity, Axel Honneth and Jacques Rancière, edited by Katia Genel and Jean-Philippe Deranty

What Is a People?, Alain Badiou, Judith Butler, Georges Didi-Huberman, Sadri Khiari, Jacques Rancière, and Pierre Bourdieu

DEATH AND MASTERY

Psychoanalytic Drive Theory and the Subject of Late Capitalism

Benjamin Y. Fong

Columbia University Press     New York

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York Chichester, West Sussex

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Copyright © 2016 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-54261-6

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Fong, Benjamin Y., author.

Title: Death and mastery: psychoanalytic drive theory and the subject of late capitalism / Benjamin Y. Fong.

Description: New York: Columbia University Press, [2016] | Series: New directions in critical theory | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016014150| ISBN 9780231176682 (cloth) | ISBN 9780231542616 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Death instinct. | Death—Psychological aspects. | Capitalism—Psychological aspects.

Classification: LCC BF175.5.D4 F66 2016 | DDC 150. 19/5—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016014150

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [e-mail].

Cover design: Rebecca Lown

You are using one part of your force to fight the other part.

—Sigmund Freud

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: In Defense of Drive Theory

Part I: Dream

1.    Death, Mastery, and the Origins of Life: Sigmund Freud’s Strange Proposal

Part II: Interpretation

2.    Between Need and Dread: Hans Loewald and the Primordial Density

3.    Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis (Reprised): Jacques Lacan and the Genesis of Omnipotence

Part III: Working Through

4.    The Psyche in Late Capitalism I: Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and the Crisis of Internalization

5.    The Psyche in Late Capitalism II: Herbert Marcuse and the Technological Lure

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

This book grew out of dialogue with a diverse set of intellectually stimulating and nourishing colleagues, mentors, friends, and family members for which I am tremendously grateful. I would like specifically to thank Mark C. Taylor and Wayne Proudfoot, for the extraordinary guidance and feedback; Kevin Kelly, whose perspicuous exposition of Freudian metapsychology helped lay the foundation for this project; Fred Neuhouser, for his valuable comments on a longer paper that eventually became chapters 1 and 2, but also for directing me to the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, where I was an Affiliate Scholar for two years; Lisa Cerami, who helped me work through some of the more impenetrable passages in Adorno; Joshua Dubler, a sounding board of unusual warmth and clarity; Yonatan Brafman and Liane Carlson, for the continuing education; Andrea Sun-Mee Jones, who is in many ways responsible for the existence of this project; that remarkable organization that is the Society for Psychoanalytic Inquiry, and in particular Jeremy Cohan, Chris Crawford, Greg Gabrellas, Scott Jenkins, Ben Koditschek, Christie Offenbacher, and Allan Scholom for their leadership; Gil Anidjar, Fabian Arzuaga (and the Social Theory Workshop at the University of Chicago), Courtney Bender, Alison Brown, Ashleigh Campi, Shanna Carlson, Bernard Faure, Daragh Grant, Jack Hawley, Phillip Henry, Andy Junker, Jonathan Lear, Mark Loeffler, Birte Löschenkohl, Moishe Postone, Jonathan Schorsch, and Simon Taylor for discussing various chapters with me; and Isaac Balbus, Jared Holley, Gabriel Levine, and Eric Santner, all of whom read the entire manuscript at critical moments in its development and whose lucid feedback gave me the confidence to move forward.

I presented a portion of this book’s introduction at the American Psychoanalytic Association’s Annual Meeting in January 2015 as an APsaA Fellow, and I would like to thank Charles Amrhein, Rosemary Johnson, and Lynne Zeavin for coordinating the fellowship and Bruce Reis and Paul Schwaber for responding to my presentation. Parts of chapters 1 and 2 were presented at the Hans W. Loewald Conference in February 2014 at the New School; thanks go to Ryan Gustafson and Hunter Robinson for organizing the conference, Brian Kloppenberg and Aleksandra Wagner for responding to my paper, and Elliot Jurist for organizing the special issue of Psychoanalytic Psychology in which the proceedings were published.

More generally, thanks to the Jacob K. Javits Foundation, Julia Clark-Spohn, Meryl Marcus, Deborah Neibel, and the Society of Fellows at the University of Chicago for their support, and to all fellow Fellows for their friendship and collegiality. Thanks also to Amy Allen, Wendy Lochner, Christine Dunbar, the two anonymous readers, and the team at Columbia University Press for the excellent feedback, encouragement, and patient attention to my many questions and requests.

To my parents, Hon and Jo Fong, my sister, Christina Fong, and my mother-in-law, Rosemary Easter, who are all unjustifiably supportive of my work, I owe a debt that far transcends the bounds of this project. Finally, not a day goes by where I do not feel an overwhelming appreciation for the love and support of my wife, Alison Easter, who is kind enough to welcome unsolicited ramblings about the conditions under which it possible to say I, and my kids, Jaya and Ziggy, baffled as they justifiably are that their second-favorite grown-up disappears for large swaths of time in order to drink coffee and stare blankly at a laptop.

* * *

A very early version of chapter 5 appeared as Death Drive Sublimation: A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Technological Development in Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society 18, no. 4 (December 2013): 352–67. Bits of chapters 1 and 2 appeared as Hans Loewald and the Death Drive in Psychoanalytic Psychology 31, no. 4 (October 2014): 525–36. I am grateful to these journals for their permission to reprint materials here.

Introduction

In Defense of Drive Theory

The theory of the instincts [Triebe] is so to say our mythology. Instincts are mythical entities, magnificent in their indefiniteness. In our work we cannot for a moment disregard them, and yet we are never sure that we are seeing them clearly.

—Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis

One could say that this book is an attempt to illuminate the varied psychic and social impediments to the achievement of mastery. When we hear the word mastery, it is natural to turn to Hegel or to think of some kind of domination or subjugation, but we very often use the word in a more everyday sense to designate the acquisition of a skill, a certain deftness of practice, or even the possession of a basic grip on a difficult situation. It is the obstacles to mastery in the latter sense of the term, and thus the question of why human beings are particularly bad at just getting along, that primarily concerns me here. One might argue that it is a mistake cleanly to separate these two: the critical theorists, after all, convincingly argued that the Enlightenment quest for mastery in the second sense has dissolved into a crisis of mastery in the first.¹

Part of what I try to do in this book is to offer an explanation of this dissolution and thus to propose a theory of the relationship between these two senses of mastery. To admit, however, that they are related, even necessarily, is not to say that we should collapse the distinction: indeed, I take the question of how we work toward a stability and equanimity that allows us to get through the day (mastery2) without going on, whether through frustration, overeagerness, or fear, then to seek the kind of excessive and controlling stability that is bought at the expense of others (mastery1) to be a fundamental one for both psychology and social theory. To give up on this distinction—to hold, in other words, that domination is bound inextricably to the task of getting the hang of life—is to fall prey to an irremediable cynicism about the possibility of psychic and social transformation.

My interest in this problematic stems from Karl Marx, who conceives of alienation as an inversion of the human being’s natural relationship of mastery over the environment. For Marx, human beings as a species are defined by their capacity consciously to "produce their means of subsistence";² in capitalism this capacity is turned against the being in whom it is manifest. Thus, we do not hone and perfect our capacities through work but are rather dulled and fragmented by work; we do not deploy our intellects toward the solution of our problems but submit to a scientific organization that demands conformity; we do not gain the satisfaction that follows from successfully furthering our abilities but rather stew in a general anxiety about losing our places in processes over which we have no control; we do not work in order to live better, in order to make a difficult but pliable world warm and inviting, but live merely in order to work and according to the demands of a world made icy and hostile. These are the basics of what, in Capital, is commonly called the immiseration thesis.³

In brief, when Marx claims that the human being is alienated under capitalism, he means that an animal whose essence it is to master its environment is itself mastered by its environment.⁴ What I find lacking in Marx, and also in the general tradition that carries his name, is any recognition of a part of our nature that actually works against our own mastery and thus willingly accepts this inversion. If, to simplify Marx’s point in The German Ideology tremendously, we are what we do, then surely some place must be made in our conception of ourselves for all the destructive behavior that serves to erode our mastery, that welcomes the destabilization wrought by capitalism, and that actively embraces, rather than passively imbibes, cultural opiates. On this last point the ideal, as I see it, would be to view the beliefs, activities, and organizations too casually labeled distractions not as ancillary to the capitalist mode of production, nor as bearing their own autonomous logic, but rather as speaking to something else about the human being left untheorized by Marx. This would be to recognize all those things we take to provide some relief from alienation to be not so different from less socially accepted ways of attaining that relief, detrimental to the mastery of our own lives, but nonetheless actually providing real satisfaction to some part of ourselves.

Despite knowing precious little about the communist system upon which he would so casually cast judgment, Sigmund Freud proposed the basics of an incisive critique of Marx’s understanding of alienation as inverted mastery: if human nature is not exhausted by the drive to mastery, and if, more radically, there exists an even more primordial counterforce to this drive, a drive to undo our own mastery and return to heteronomy, then Marx’s theory and its attendant vision of liberation must, at the very least, be rethought.⁵ Indeed, if something like what Freud called the death drive exists, capitalism could actually be said to provide a form of perverse psychic gratification in undermining the individual’s mastery. That satisfaction might be ultimately damaging to our general fulfillment, but its very existence nonetheless implies that the theory of alienation could benefit from a new proposal as to what constitutes our nature, one that takes into account a psychic force that works against our own mastery. The current project first took root when I realized that it was in the same text (Beyond the Pleasure Principle) in which Freud proposed the existence of this drive that two conceptions of mastery, roughly corresponding to what I have dubbed mastery1 (in Freud, Bemächtigung) and mastery2 (Bewältigung), became conceptually fused in his metapsychology. My intuition and hope, more or less stubbornly enacted in the pages that follow, was that a more robust understanding of how precisely we are alienated today could be formulated by working out the relations between the death drive and these two forms of mastery.⁶

As Marx was the soil and Freud the seed, I naturally accepted a great deal of help in cultivating my little plot from the so-called Frankfurt School. Largely under the influence of early friend and later foe Erich Fromm, the Frankfurt School famously turned to psychoanalysis to supplement Marxism with a psychological analysis of the motivations behind ideological subjectification.⁷ While generally faithful to Freud in his early years, Fromm rejected outright his later metapsychology, and specifically his theory of the death drive.⁸ The integration of psychoanalysis that took place under his watch thus self-consciously neglected the drive theory that Freud defended from the 1920s to his death. Though Fromm’s influence on the inner circle of the Frankfurt School was to be short-lived, his understanding of the late metapsychology as essentially pessimistic and thus unserviceable in its original form remained at the core of critical theory. Thus, even Herbert Marcuse, Fromm’s greatest detractor, could only theorize that which seems to defy any hypothesis of a non-repressive civilization as a by-product of frustration.⁹ Like most marriages, the critical theorists’ marriage of Marx and Freud involved a bit of both repression and suppression.¹⁰

The stage is now more or less set: a problem of mastery in Marx, a possible solution in Freud, and a very interesting conversation by proxy unfortunately structured around the neglect of that solution. What I have just described is a simplification, of course, and what follows will, without a doubt, spill over the sides of this narrative. I nonetheless hope it is enough to entice the reader into following me through the perils of execution. I would further hope, however, that the grand what if question at the heart of this project finds answers, or at least echoes thereof, in the present. Of course, a great deal of time separates us from Marx and Freud, and even the Fordist-Keynesian paradigm in which the Frankfurt School operated seems somewhat distant from the present; but no energy need be spent demonstrating the continued relevance of the contradictions inherent in capitalism as described by Marx, the contradictions inherent in the psyche as described by Freud, and the strange intermingling of those contradictions as described by the critical theorists. To those who would decline engagement with my argument ahead of time, and even to those who think I was born fifty-some years too late, I am afraid any such effort would be a plunge into the void.¹¹

I will, however, attempt to do more focused justificatory work in the remainder of this introduction, specifically pertaining to the nature of psychoanalytic drive theory. It was not so long ago that discussion of these psychic forces proudly bore the label scientific. Today, however, they have been relegated to the mythological, the realm that Freud, in any case, thought was their natural home. Rather than lamenting this reversion, I take it as a positive opportunity to reassert the nature and value of drive theory free of the scientism that plagued the American psychoanalytic scene for so many years. In a sense, now that the wave of anti-Freudianism has subsided,¹² and along with it the fury at Freud’s misguided biologism, it has been given a clean slate, like so many theories that are chewed up and spit out by history. Having been placed right in that wonderful no-man’s-land between irrelevance and outmodedness, I find it an opportune time to revisit Freud’s grand mythology.

Drive, Psyche, and Interpretation Before 1920…

It is customary to divide Freud’s corpus into three main periods: 1. his prepsychoanalytic writings of the late 1800s; 2. his early psychoanalytic work beginning with The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), in which he develops the topographical model of unconscious, preconscious, and conscious; and 3. his late work beginning with Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), in which he develops the structural model of id, ego, and superego. The drive theory that will be examined and expanded upon in the chapters that follow was first developed in the last of these three periods, during which time Freud came to a radically new understanding not only of the drives but also of the nature of the psyche and of psychoanalytic therapy. It is my aim in the next few sections of this introduction to explain how Freud’s understandings of drive, psyche, and interpretation changed between his early and late periods as well as how these three fundamental concepts became more intimately related after 1920.

For the early Freud, drive (Trieb) is primarily somatic in origin (though it is unclear whether or not drives themselves are strictly somatic forces) and is thus not primarily a force of the psyche but rather one applied to the psyche. When impinged upon by the drives, it is the psyche’s task then to process the incoming stimuli [and] to discharge them again in some modified form.¹³ Since the psyche is understood here to be a kind of stimulus-processing mechanical instrument, we might call this the mechanism model of the psyche.¹⁴ For my present purposes, all that I wish to emphasize here is that drive, in this early model, is essentially an external and disturbing force, a source of chaos upsetting to a psychic apparatus seeking stability, order, and repose. For the most part, a healthy tension is maintained, but at those life-defining moments when Dionysus runs roughshod over Apollo, the latter draws upon its own proprietary tactic for coping with its failure: repression. By banishing the memory of its having been overcome to the unconscious, the psyche is able to return quickly to the status quo but without learning from the experience and thus to the detriment of its own health. The task of interpretation is then to name particular instances during which the psyche was unable to manage the demands placed upon it, with the aim not of quelling, or otherwise altering, the drives, but rather of bringing said failure to consciousness and thereby replacing hysterical misery with common unhappiness.¹⁵

As an example: a wealthy young Russian named Sergei Pankejeff comes to see Freud in 1910 with a variety of maladies all circulating around a state of deep depression.¹⁶ In the course of reviewing his personal history, Freud discovers conflict in virtually all of Pankejeff’s early relationships. Shortly after his birth, his mother begins to suffer from abdominal disorders and as a result has relatively little to do with his rearing (despite hanging about as a cold, distant presence). Throughout his childhood, his precocious older sister regularly seduces him into a variety of sexual practices while planting wild ideas in his head. He recalls, on one occasion, her playing with his penis while telling him by way of explanation that his Nanya (the peasant nurse who was caring for him in his mother’s absence) regularly did the same with their gardener’s genitals. As a result of these experiences, the boy takes on a passive attitude toward sexual activity—it is something done to him—and begins to distrust the sole source of maternal warmth in his life. His Nanya does her part to confirm that distrust: catching him playing with his penis in front of her, she threatens that he will get a wound there. Finally, and perhaps on account of all of these factors, the child develops a great attachment to his father, who is frequently away in sanatoriums and who overtly prefers his more boyish elder sister.¹⁷

These are the basics of the case study that Freud would publish in 1918 under the title From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,¹⁸ known more affectionately (or cruelly) as the case of the Wolfman, so called on account of an anxiety dream that Pankejeff has just before his fourth birthday wherein he opens a window to find wolves sitting silently and motionlessly in a tree. There is a great deal more to this case, perhaps Freud’s most elaborate and important,¹⁹ but we can already see the basic ingredients for depression here. However, rather than chalk up his adult neurosis to this set of infantile factors (undoubtedly the most sensible route to take), Freud instead posits the existence of a repressed primal scene that relates to all of these factors but is, according to Freud, the real cause of Pankejeff’s illness. The infamous scene runs essentially as follows: at the ripe young age of eighteen months, Pankejeff wakes up from an afternoon nap to find his parents engaged in coitus a tergo (from behind). On Freud’s explanation, while the young boy does not know precisely what to make of this scene at first, it slowly comes to bear an overwhelming significance: as his mother grows increasingly ill, he cannot help but feel that the violent motions he had witnessed that afternoon had somehow caused her infirmity. Even more important: both as a result of being the passive object of his sister’s sexual researches and of his intense affection for his father, he comes to identify himself in his mother’s position, simultaneously wishing to occupy her role as love object while fearing the violence that this position entails, vividly demonstrated to him in the primal scene.

In discovering and articulating the repressed primal scene to the Wolfman, Freud understood himself to have liberated his patient in one particular way: having been debased by his sister and threatened by his Nanya, the boy had overcompensated for these early wrongs with an aggressive masculinity, expressed first in an early phase of cruelty (Pankejeff was, by his own admission, a sadistic child) and then later in his adolescence in an exaggerated enthusiasm for military affairs. This masculine protest was cover for a wish that had been engendered by the very passivity to which he was protesting: in short, to be penetrated by his father as his mother had been in the primal scene. The repression of this homosexual object cathexis was in large part responsible for the disconnect between the Wolfman’s affective life and his intelligence: his critical faculties had been impaired by his positive wish not to confront his desires, leading to a state of general depletion and indifference accented by bizarre rituals and erratic behavior within which the repressed current forced its way to the surface. In bringing the primal scene to consciousness, the Wolfman recognized that toward which his drives were propelling him and in so doing relieved himself not of the drives themselves but of the neurotic misery they were causing.

Everything I have said thus far of this case has been explained according to Freud’s early understandings of drive, psyche, and interpretation. In conjunction with later experiences that activated its implications,²⁰ the primal scene had forcefully awakened Pankejeff’s sexual and aggressive drives, and he had dealt with the overwhelming and conflicting feelings that followed by repressing it. The drives, however, remained active, leading him to a variety of activities in which could be found an unstable mixture of desire and aggression. Freud’s interpretation then named the actual moment of having been overwhelmed and, in so doing, was able to rob the primal scene of its unconscious power.

…and After 1920

Like many readers of this case, I have always taken Freud’s interpretation to be so patently absurd that mere rejection somehow misses the mark. I thus feel comfortable in claiming that if we understand this case as the early Freud did, there is little reason to read it as anything more than a document of the wild ramblings that a self-appointed seer once offered to a fragile young man in need of real help. Fortunately, around the time that the Wolfman’s (first) analysis with Freud was terminating (and perhaps on account of what transpired in this wild case),²¹ the early understandings of the drives, the psyche, and the task of interpretation that I have just outlined all began to fall apart.²² As if in an effort to reorient himself, Freud set out, at the end of 1914, to systematize his metapsychology—his stock of theories concerning the general nature and structure of psychic life—in a twelve-chapter treatise that he hoped would be a landmark of psychology. The project never materialized, and, in the five papers that did eventually see the light of day,²³ it is easy to see why: what begin as earnest attempts to illuminate a particular pillar of psychoanalytic theory quickly introduce contradictions and tangents that find no resolution within their pages.

None of the so-called metapsychology papers demonstrates this tendency to unravel better than Instincts and Their Vicissitudes (1915), a veritable mess that foreshadows, in marking off the limits of one line of thought, the Freudian turn to come. The paper aims to outline the basics of the aforementioned mechanism model of the psyche, which, as Hans Loewald aptly observes,²⁴ assumes two rigid distinctions: first, that between psyche and soma (drives impinge on the psyche from without, i.e., from the body) and, second, that between psyche-soma and world (drives arise not from the environment but only from the body). Though Freud means to uphold these two distinctions at the outset of the paper, both very quickly deteriorate. Shortly after defining drive as a stimulus applied to the mind, he claims that a drive appears to us as a concept on the frontier between the mental and the somatic, as the psychical representative of the stimuli originating from within the organism.²⁵ One must immediately wonder: is drive the stimulus or is it the psychic representative of the stimulus (or does it only appear to us as a psychic representative)? And how would we know the